Making sure your logs work

SECURE LOGGING

I was looking at my server backups the other day and suddenly realized I had no backups of the logfiles – you know, all the stuff in /var/log/ that you ignore until something breaks. Also, I realized I had no idea whether logging was actually working, so maybe I should go about fixing this.

Well-used services write reams of log information to disk, which is not only bothersome from a storage perspective but also pushes grep and the usual group of statistics tools to their limits. Will hitching the syslog daemon up to a database help?